Month: March 2008
-
George Gardner Symons
George Gardner Symons was an Amreican painter active in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. He was born in Chicago and was one of the early artists to live and work in California in the 1890’s, after the trans-continanal railroad made the previously remote section of the U.S. more accessible (see my posts on…
-
Al Jaffee
Al Jaffee is a cartoonist and comics artist who is best known as a long-time contributor to Mad magazine. Early in his career, Jaffee worked for Timely Comics and then Atlas Comics, which were early forms of the company that became Marvel Comics. Jaffee joined Mad magazine in in 1955, shortly after editor Harvey Kurtzman…
-
Kurt Weiser
The history of the art of china painting is a long one. It is an art in which the application of paint and glazes was initially used to decorate ceramic vessels with patterns and eventually with images of varying degrees of representational detail and complexity. Kurt Weiser is a contemporary ceramics artist and painter who…
-
Heinrich Zille
Heinrich Zille is an artist I was unfamiliar with until I came across this article in the New York Times. Apparently, I’m not alone, in that he is not well known outside his native Germany. There, however, he is not only well known but celebrated, particularly in his adopted home of Berlin, where he came…
-
Ivan Nikolaevich Kramskoy
Ivan Nikolaevich Kramskoy was the leader of the 19th Century group of Russian realist artists known as the Peredvizhniki, (in English the “Itinerants” or the “Wanderers”), who mounted joint traveling exhibitions in protest of the restrictive policies of the official Russian Academy (somewhat parallel to the French Impressionists’ participation in the “Salon des Refusés”). Members…
-
Alan Pollack
After studying as several colleges, including the School of Visual Arts and the New York Academy of Figurative Art, fantasy artist Alan Pollack decided to focus on illustrations for role playing game companies. He worked for a while for TSR, the company responsible for Dungeons and Dragons, and has since gone freelance, adding companies like…